Breaking Down The Phoenix Suns’ 2015-16 Schedule Piece By Piece

Overview

I’m not sure how many other people do this, but whenever the Suns’ schedule comes out, the first thing I do is go through it game-by-game and pick the winner of each of them. Even though we all know who the Suns’ opponents are (and in most cases how many times the Suns are going to play them), it still helps, at least for me, to go through it game-by-game, which kind of inspired this post.

And while I wanted to write about the whole season, I realize analyzing 82 games as a whole can be a lot to take in. To be fair, most people probably wouldn’t want to read a post like that, and those who did would probably get fatigued doing so quite quickly. So to combat that, I broke up the schedule into four pieces (the beginning, the establishing stretch, the difficult stretch and the playoff push), which happened to coincide nicely with breaking the season up month-by-month, so that was the way to go.

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As you read, you’ll notice I included predictions, in addition to a best-case realistic scenario and worst-case realistic scenario, in terms of projected record. For best-case, I determined it by simply looking at each individual game and giving the Suns the win if the matchup favored them and threw in an extra win for every two losing matchups that were close. For worst-case scenario I assigned the team a loss in most close-game scenarios, and additionally, gave them no more than two wins on any four-game road trip, and no more than three wins on any six-game road trip.

Obviously, it’s not a science, but my individual picks are above those scenarios, labeled as “bottom line.” I also went ahead and included projected cumulative record next to each of those in parentheses. I do want to note with my predictions I’m posting them as though either one of the following two scenarios will happen: Either Markieff Morris will stay with the Suns next year, or he will be traded, but the Suns will be able to acquire a similar level of talent. Basically, that will allow me to give a prediction that more reflects where the team is now, rather than worrying about the unknown.

There’s also more of a summary and conclusion on the last slide, so if you don’t want to read through the whole thing you can just skip ahead to that. That page will also include information such as number of back-to-backs and home/road games in each individual month.

So without any further ado, here is the Suns’ road back to the playoffs, starting off with the opening stretch of the season.

Next: Starting things off...